Observer: Metaphysics in the Megabookstore

By RICHARD SHUSTERMAN

Philosophy may have originated with the fascinating dialogues
that Socrates provocatively conducted in the Athenian agora, but
can it interest a public in the American marketplace of the 21st
century? Since philosophy -- unlike cars, cereals, and
cosmetics -- is not the sort of commercially lucrative
commodity to inspire market research, there is little systematic
study of its ability to command and sustain an audience outside the
groves of academe and religious institutions. But for the past four
years, I have been conducting an informal experiment by playing
host to a regular meet-the-author philosophy-discussion series at
Philadelphia's Center City Barnes & Noble bookstore, which is
handsomely housed in a stylish old bank building on fashionable
Rittenhouse Square. At these sessions, I discuss with guest authors
their recent books and the philosophical issues that inspire them,
so I call the series "Dialogues on the Square." The meetings, held
one weekday evening a month during the academic year, have
delightfully surprised me (and the bookstore management) by the
consistently large and varied audience they repeatedly bring.

Corporate megabookstore chains like Barnes & Noble are not
known for being particularly hospitable to academic publishing.
Hard-core philosophy books are never prominently displayed in such
stores (as they are in European bookshops); they struggle even to
find shelf space. Often squeezed out of the philosophy section by
commercial books on new age or esoteric "philosophy," serious
philosophical works also suffer, like other academic books, from
the corporate bookstores' economically brutal policy on the return
of unsold copies to the publishers.

I never imagined a chain bookstore would be interested in
nurturing a philosophy-author series, nor was I originally
interested in such a venue. With an active publishing, teaching,
and lecturing career in America and Europe, I was not lonely and
yearning for an audience. Besides, as chairman of a philosophy
department with a thriving Ph.D. program, it was hard to find time
and justification to flirt with new extracurricular arenas. So how
did I get into this long-term relationship with a corporate giant?
It started with a one-night stand.

In 1997 I published a book called Practicing Philosophy, whose
central argument was that long before philosophy became a
university discipline, it was most famously conceived and practiced
as a distinctive way of life. Philosophy could revive itself,
regaining its cultural importance and public role, I suggested, by
again becoming a purposeful art of living, aimed not only at
knowledge and self-improvement but at improving the polis in which
the self is situated.

The book proved appealing enough to get some reviews in the
general press, and one article in The Philadelphia Inquirer was so
engagingly written as to prompt an invitation from Barnes &
Noble for a talk and book signing, the first such bookstore
invitation I ever received in the States.

Flattered by the unexpected attention, and keen to promote the
book's message of taking philosophy beyond its mere academic
pursuit, I eagerly accepted the gig without much thought about what
I was in for. I had second thoughts, however, when I saw in the
monthly Barnes & Noble calendar that my book presentation was
sandwiched between two other talks on different evenings that same
week of November, one by a well-known chef outlining innovative
recipes for Thanksgiving, the other by an author expert on cigars
and liqueurs. How could philosophy compete with such popular
sensual addictions? My anxiety peaked when I arrived half an hour
before my talk and heard it advertised on the store's PA system in
the manner of "Attention, shoppers!," as if it were a special sale
on skin creams or salami.

The event turned out to be one of the most exciting experiences
in my philosophical career. Facing about two dozen people, crammed
into a third-floor space between the film and music books, I felt
an adrenaline rush as I struggled to captivate an audience that was
not already held institutionally captive by their need to get a
grade or satisfy the polite rules of academic etiquette. Teaching
philosophy to Temple University's undergraduates had already
schooled me in a "Where's the beef?" style of philosophy that my
research in pragmatism also taught me to respect.

Now, besides the fun of "keeping it real," there was the thrill
of live performance as a "stand-up" philosopher before an
unfamiliar, uncertain audience who could at any moment wander off
to browse for books or visit the second-floor cafe. They needed to
be kept in their seats by the sheer power of philosophical insight,
wit, logical argument, and -- perhaps most important
-- an ability to really listen to and seriously engage the
audience's questions and comments. Such lively interaction benefits
both the public and the profession of philosophy, so I resolved to
find a way to share this experience with colleagues by establishing
a regular forum for such encounters.

Thanks to the success of my Rittenhouse Square performance, the
store's program organizer, Marilyn Flanagan, was ready to take a
chance on a regular monthly series in which I would hold dialogues
with guest authors.

Besides the reassuring sense of continuity in having a regular
host, this "dialogue" format has several advantages over solo
performances. Audiences are more easily bored by long monologues
than when the guest speaker's remarks come in response to
questions, as in the typical talk-show format. After the author is
introduced and gives an opening 15-minute presentation, my job as
host is to bring out the best of the author's book by asking the
sort of questions that will prompt her to deliver her best ideas,
which she may have omitted in her first remarks.

The host also has other useful roles. Noticing when the audience
is getting restless or when the author is losing her train of
thought, the host can interject a comment or question to redirect
and revive the discussion. After about 30 minutes of such dialogue,
the program concludes with a half hour of questions from the
audience, principally directed at the guest author.

Even then, the host's role is crucial. More familiar with both
audience and author, he can decode initially incomprehensible
questions and answers, clear up misunderstandings, and even serve
as an intellectual "bouncer" to divert hostile or insensitive
questions that could embarrass or offend the author and disrupt the
productive spirit of discussion.

Philosophy can deal with emotionally charged topics. Two events
were devoted to authors who examined, through personal experience,
the shattering of selfhood through the trauma of rape. An obviously
insensitive line of questioning directed at one of those guests had
to be derailed before the entire room exploded, and the host's
established authority made it easy.

The variety of publics making up the audience must be considered
in planning a program like "Dialogues." Although a faithful core
attended every event, most of the audience varied with the book
topics. These ranged from Plato and the pre-Socratics to
postmodernism and contemporary French feminism, from questions of
taste, art, and the environment to issues of race, gender, and
truth in journalism. I was surprised to discover that books on a
famously austere philosopher like Kant or on a little-known
African-American philosopher like Alain Locke could draw as large
an audience as books on trendy thinkers like Heidegger or
Derrida.

I also learned that the bookstore never really cared how many
copies of the featured book were sold (although the author
sometimes did). What mattered was regularly bringing an audience of
typically 30 to 60 people into the store. Odds were that some of
them would buy something.

Sales of featured books often had less to do with the excellence
of the text and performance than with the type of audience and
their felt relationship to the author. A brilliant book discussion
by a very distinguished Ivy League author generated no visible
sales of autographed copies. Admiring listeners were either too
humbled by his stature or too proud to request a signed copy.
Solidarity sells more, which is why African-American and female
authors consistently outsold the rest.

Beyond such anecdotal curiosities, instructive as they may be,
there is a much more important lesson to be learned from my four
years of running "Dialogues." Philosophers and other humanities
professors who yearn to be public intellectuals are often
disappointed when their work fails to win the attention of the
daily press and general-interest intellectual magazines with wide
circulation.

Such theorists wrongly conflate a public intellectual with what
is more aptly called a "media intellectual." In an age when
everything seems electronically mediated and where intellectual
mass-media offerings seem thin and standardized, there is a public
hungry for direct, face-to-face discussion of important issues in
an open, lively way, free from the tired histrionics and
predictable polemics of staged debates.

Drawing a simplistic dichotomy between academe and the general
public, we forget that there are ways and venues to engage that
public so as to communicate our research and inform opinion. That a
public is local and limited does not mean it is insignificant. For
the time we belong to it, it forms the world of our experience.

Currently on leave, in Hiroshima, Japan, I am far from the
"Dialogues" public but appreciate it even more from this critical
distance. I will miss doing the "show" this year, but my research
appointment abroad will give me much-needed time for reading new
books to furnish the series when I return.

Richard Shusterman is chairman of the philosophy department at
Temple University and a visiting professor at Hiroshima University,
in Japan. His most recent book is Surface and Depth (Cornell
University Press, 2002).

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